Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

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Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 · rating details · 1,354 ratings · 250 reviews

A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar

Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of f...more

Hardcover, 230 pages

Published October 30th 2008 by Gotham

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Mar 29, 2013 Manny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: blame-jordan-if-you-like, linguistics-and-philosophy, well-i-think-its-funny, strongly-recommended, pooh-dante

A fantastic book! I have not come across anyone, not even Steven Pinker, who does such a good job of showing you how exciting linguistics can be. His bold and unconventional history of the English language was full of ideas I'd never seen before, but which made excellent sense. And, before I get into the review proper, a contrite apology to Jordan. She gave it to me six months ago as a birthday present, and somehow I didn't open it until last week. Well, Jordan, thank you, and I'll try to be mor...more

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Feb 16, 2009 Terence rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Language/linguistics fans

Shelves: science-language-linguistics, science-general

This is an extraordinarily delightful little book that highlights some of English's lesser known idiosyncrasies because, as the author notes, English is not just a collection of words, nor is its genius an markedly unusual openness to new vocabulary.

I first encountered John McWhorter with his book The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language Paperback, which traced the evolution of languages from a "first language" and which is also highly recommended. (Actually, having read The Singing Nea ...more

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Mar 01, 2009 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction-read

John McWhorter has done it again! For those who love language, there is no author better to educate and entertain on all matters linguistic. In the current work, he proves that Celtic grammatical structures have given English its "meaningless do" (as in "Do you know what I mean?") and its normative progressive present tense (as in "I am writing" rather than the more usual in other Germanic languages "I write"). He, in fact, rather belabors the point in the first chapter to an extent that can onl...more

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Feb 19, 2009 Sandy D. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, history, great-britain-ireland, books-about-books-and-or-words

Recommended by a blogger at the Ann Arbor library, and rightly so - McWhorter is a funny writer and a historical linguist. I'm a little shocked at how well he writes, given the fact that he studies linguistics, in fact. Anthropologists in general do not write well for the general reader (with the exception of Robert Sapolsky, whom I adore, and Kent Flannery, who has written a few truly funny paragraphs that are stuck in the middle of boring-to-anyone-outside-the-field archaeological monographs)....more

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Apr 09, 2010 Lavinia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010, non-fiction, in-en

Never thought Linguistics can be so much fun! Too many details to discuss. But if you ever wondered why, for instance, "you" has the same form for both singular and plural, why we say "aren't I" instead of the more logical "amn't I", why we use the meaningless "do" or "they" as a singular pronoun instead of he/she when the gender is not clear, you might get some answers or at least accept the fact that, in the author's own words, "shitte happens". He uses facts, comparison, logic and fun to expl...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Angie Martin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: grammar-english

First, I want to say that I "read" this book as an audio book. I say that to point out that the INTRODUCTION to this book was about 1.5 hrs long. Much of the content in the intro should have been incorporated and divided into chapters in the body of the work. The actual content itself was relatively interesting but I found myself drifting because I couldn't remember my high school English classes, especially the bits about cases, persons, tenses, etc. Before you jump into this one, I would sugge...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Angela Forfia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: linguistics-anthropology

The vast majority of linguistics books for the mass market are books about the history of words. If you pick up a typical history of the English language, you will learn about words we got from the Vikings, words we got from the French, words we got from the colonial era...with very little information about the structure of the English language itself. While these books are full of fun factoids--did you know shampoo comes from Hindi?--they never get to the heart of what makes language fascinatin...more

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Jul 02, 2012 Angela Benedetti rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, nf-language-words-linguistics, nf-history

John McWhorter is an excellent lecturer, and his writing is just as good. This book gives a big-picture view of how English developed out of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European, rather than the tightly focused view one usually gets from scholars who've never studied anything but English. He's clearly arguing against some traditional views of the development of English -- half the fun is watching a smart, articulate writer demolish a hoary old academic edifice with facts and logic and wit. He...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Ryan Long rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a decent piece of revisionist linguistic history. The arguments are well-reasoned, and the prose is nice. People with an affinity for language will like this book. More specifically, native English speakers who know at least a couple of foreign languages will have a good time reading this book.

A few criticisms:

First, the book is written at least at a high school reading level, perhaps even a junior high reading level. I realize that making the language a bit more intellectual would put...more

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Apr 16, 2012 D. Morgenstern rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: reference, favorites, reviewed

A very readable yet still meticulously researched work. It makes a well detailed argument for the argument of Celtic influence in English and has a good argument against Sapir-Whorf in the idea of using it to perpetuate the idea of the "noble savage".

Though as others have pointed out at times the rants go a little too far and honestly I found the argument about the piano playing families so convoluted that if I had not already had an idea of what he was getting it-- he would have lost me entire...more

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Feb 13, 2012 Alana rated it 4 of 5 stars

It is always frustrating to read popular linguistics books as a layperson because you never know when that cool thing you just read is going to turn out to be at least partly untrue. This book is repetitive, but it goes far to explain who disagrees with the author, why they disagree, and why the fact that they disagree doesn't mean that they are just a bunch of closed minded idiots. This is important if you're used to approaching these books with a healthy dose of skepticism. Yes, the points mad...more

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Feb 12, 2012 Лорче rated it 1 of 5 stars

I am not an expert, but I did major in Linguistics in college. I found McWhorter's arguments horribly oversimplified and tedious to read. I'm glad that he is putting linguistic scholarship out there for the general public, but someone with even a rudimentary knowledge (or even a grammar or history nerd) would know.

Being familiar with some of the counter-arguments he suggests, I can say that he presents them in a manner intended to make them appear somewhat foolish, rather than addressing them pr...more I am not an expert, but I did major in Linguistics in college. I found McWhorter's arguments horribly oversimplified and tedious to read. I'm glad that he is putting linguistic scholarship out there for the general public, but someone with even a rudimentary knowledge (or even a grammar or history nerd) would know.

Being familiar with some of the counter-arguments he suggests, I can say that he presents them in a manner intended to make them appear somewhat foolish, rather than addressing them properly. He does make good arguments about the adaptations he suggests, but the manner in which he goes about it is distracting and annoying. Going on a several-page rant about cars as a thinly-disguised metaphor for grammar is just beating the reader over the head with a stick, trying to make a point.

The book is self-referential, perhaps in an attempt to be light-hearted and comedic, but it fails miserably. The same examples come up again and again, and it feels like the author feels the need to impress the reader with his wide familiarity with languages. He makes many references to certain other languages and the places he traveled (sorry he was unable to find lemonade while in Scandenavia).

The section on the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis was mocking. The hypothesis does not mean that people can't understand a concept their language has no word for, it is about what one is obliged to think about every time ones speaks.

McWhorter dismisses the idea of something happening without any basis, but doesn't address the dozens of times within the history of Germanic or of English where we really have documented cases of that happening, ie the Great English Vowel Shift.

I found his idea that Germanic may have had Phoenician influences interesting… I don't feel the need to attribute Grimm's law to Phoenician sound changes- sounds moving around are not nearly as improbably as the author makes them sound. The fact that a third of Germanic words don't have an easily identifiable PIE relating is intriguing, but some of the words he cites are words that are very rarely adopted in linguistic shadings. The Online Etymology Dictionary proposes that in some cases, a desire to avoid "taboo" words may have lead to the adoption of other words, such as replacing the PIE *esen- with a less taboo word, something based on *bhle and which turns up in English as "blood." These alternatives get no space in McWhorter's account.

If you have an interest in linguistics, this may be an interesting read. Overall, I found it annoying to read and enjoyed neither McWhorter's manner of presenting his ideas nor the ideas themselves.(less)

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Oct 22, 2011 Joe Mcveigh rated it 5 of 5 stars

John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is one of the most interesting books about the English language that I have read. That's saying a lot since books about the English language is all I seem to read. I don't review them enough since they're usually textbooks (fun!), but Tongue definitely deserves a review, even if it's just me telling you to go out and buy it.

Go out and buy Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter.

Tongue attempts to answer a few questions about English that...more John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is one of the most interesting books about the English language that I have read. That's saying a lot since books about the English language is all I seem to read. I don't review them enough since they're usually textbooks (fun!), but Tongue definitely deserves a review, even if it's just me telling you to go out and buy it.

Go out and buy Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter.

Tongue attempts to answer a few questions about English that have either been overlooked or brushed aside by linguists. One of them is the mysterious nature of our meaningless do in phrases such as Do you realize...?. R.L.G. at the Economist's blog Johnson has described Mr. McWhorter's stance much better than I could, so I'll link to that post (Hint: the existence of meaningless do in Welsh and Cornish, as well as English, is not a coincidence).

McWhorter also takes on the Viking impact on English and the pesky notion that our words channel our thought, but what I liked best about his book is when he points out that there is a problem when linguists focus solely on one aspect of one language. He says,

The specialization endemic to modern academia means that few of these scholars do their work with grammar sketches of all the Germanic languages and their histories in their heads, much less of languages around the world. They write mostly about English alone and, as often as not, just single features of its grammar.

It's an unfortunate reality. Specialists in any field can't be expected to know everything about their field (which is why they're called “specialists”). So I enjoyed how McWhorter refrained from going on a witch hunt and faulting the linguists who overlooked the topics of Tongue.

As I said before, you should read Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. It is well written and well researched. Moreover, it's a great book for people who can't be bothered to read linguistics textbooks and journals – or for those of us who wish to read something in between the textbooks and journals.(less)

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Jul 23, 2011 SA rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

I really enjoyed this. The main thrust of McWhorter's argument--that the shift from Old English to Middle and then Modern English resulted in a grammatical shift affected by the influence of the Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, Pictish) languages--is one that I already believed based on my own Welsh study in university. I guess I was mostly surprised that it was not a largely accepted argument among linguists, not being myself a professional or academic linguist. But for all that I found his case comp...more

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Jul 13, 2011 Maria rated it 3 of 5 stars

While written in an entertaining and humorous tone, the author belabors a few points a little too much for my taste. He spends almost 70 pages establishing why he is unique among all linguists because of his belief that English has been influenced by Celtic languages. It really could have been written in half the length but he seems to enjoy his own voice.

There are multiple examples provided to support his theories, & he has made this accessible to non-academics, but his tone of "us" (anyone...more

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Apr 22, 2011 Lauren Albert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: language-and-languages, history-british

This was a fun book--he has a good sense of humor and makes things clear for laymen. Among other things, he gives his arguments for why he believes that the Celts influenced our vocabulary and why he believes the Vikings simplified our grammar (not intentionally, of course).

One of the first things I used to tell my students in Freshman English as that language rules are simply conventions. Of course, I explained that because they WERE the conventions, we had to learn to follow them in certain si...more

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Mar 19, 2011 Nicholas Whyte rated it 4 of 5 stars

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is a short book (less than 200 pages), looking at grammar. McWhorter makes five main points, one of which was completely new and intriguing to me.

1) That the '-ing' present progressive and 'do' constructions in English come from Celtic languages. I had twigged to the former while dabbling in Irish last year; but it seems that both Welsh and Cornish also use the verb 'do' in the equivalent of questions and negatives - Do you agree? I don't agree. McWhorter argues th...more Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is a short book (less than 200 pages), looking at grammar. McWhorter makes five main points, one of which was completely new and intriguing to me.

1) That the '-ing' present progressive and 'do' constructions in English come from Celtic languages. I had twigged to the former while dabbling in Irish last year; but it seems that both Welsh and Cornish also use the verb 'do' in the equivalent of questions and negatives - Do you agree? I don't agree. McWhorter argues that English should be regarded as having a strong element of Celtic grammar as well as Germanic at its root. I basically agreed with this already but he goes on a bit too much about it, almost accusing the likes of Crystal and McCrum of deliberately ignoring it. A side argument is that written Anglo-Saxon is a poor guide to how it was spoken.

2) That there is no harm in linguistic innovation and no absolutely right way to write or speak English. That's his privilege as a linguist, though in fact denies the interesting social process by which some innovations do become acceptable.

3) That the drop-off in inflection of English nouns was caused by mixing with Old Norse from the Viking invasions. Not a lot to say on this, though he says it at length, and I'm pretty sure I had heard this before.

4) That the Sapir-Whorf theory is rubbish. He doesn't spend as much time on this as Steven Pinker, but it is after all stating the bleeding obvious.

5) That the differences between Proto-Germanic, as reconstructed, and the other Indo-European languages might be explained by its speakers around 500 BC having been strongly influenced by a Semitic language. This was a new and fascinating idea for me. McWhorter says he is quoting a German scholar, Theo Vennemann (who also argues for hidden influence from Basque on most Northern European languages including the Germanic ones), and that there are three key observations here:

i) the shifts from stops to fricatives of p -> f (pater/father), t -> th (tres/three) and k -> h (canis/hound) would fit with contact with a language which had a lot more sibilants, as Semitic languages do. On the surface this is the weakest of the points, but it's slightly stronger than McWhorter realises - he notes without further comment that the only other Indo-European language group to have undergone that kind of shift is Armenian, but in fact Armenian is demonstrably geographically close to various Semitic languages and for all I know has more evident signs of contact;
ii) vowel shifts to mark tenses - sing/sang/sung, ride/rode/ridden - a mutation found universally in Germanic languages, not at all in other Indo-European languages, and universally in the Semitic languages (at least between present and past tenses)
iii) an area where again I think the evidence is stronger than McWhorter allows, the etymology of some of the words that are found in Germanic and not in other languages is not a bad match for Semitic: "fear"; being /furkhtaz/ in Proto-Germanic and /p-r-kh/ in Proto-Semitic; the word for a group of soldiers that became our "folk" and Hebrew פלוגה ("detachment") from Proto-Germanic /fulka/, Proto-Semitic /p-l-kh/; the Germanic word from which we get "over" and German and Dutch get "Ufer" and "oever" meaning "shore", linked to the Biblical Hebrew ʔeƀer/עבר, a root with various travelling and crossing-over connotations which is itself the source of the word "Hebrew".

McWhorter doesn't even mention the British Israelites, who will love this theory once they find out about it, but instead postulates contact through Phoenician maritime exploring, for which there is some archaeological evidence, though more such evidence may be drowned on the floor of the North Sea. Anyway, I love this theory, and someone should write a novel about Phoenicians getting lost among the swamps and bogs of Scandinavia. (Harry Harrison, if memory serves me right, already did one suggesting such a lost mariner getting involved in the building of Stonehenge, but that would have been a bit earlier.)

Anyway, a book that is slightly uneven in style but provocative and well-sourced. Great for those of us who are interested in that sort of thing. There's a lot of metaphorical reference to other languages beating English up, reminiscent of James Nicoll's famous statement, but different in that McWhorter is discussing grammar rather than vocabulary and portrays English as the victim rather than the perpetrator. (less)

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Jul 07, 2010 JP Schmidt added it · review of another edition

Well written in a jokey style. Written for the layman, but much of what he presents is familiar to someone who know some linguistics. McWhorter, a prof at Berkeley, put forth his theory that English, despite having very few Celtic words other than place names in its lexicon, was strongly influenced by a Celtic substratum. A small group of Anglo-Saxon invaders foisted there language on a much larger Celtic-speaking population who altered the orginial language. The evidence for this comes in the o...more

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Jun 22, 2010 Gary Medlock rated it 4 of 5 stars

In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, it seems Mr. McWhorter is enjoying himself. While this is usually indicative of an author’s appreciation for his subject and his ability to impart his knowledge of that subject to his audience, Mr. McWhorter has another motive at play. He seems, at times, to enjoy bringing an unorthodox grammar history to the reader, but even more so, he revels in such unorthodoxy’s seeming requisite jabs at fellow critics whose ideas he’s undermining and whose conservative lin...more In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, it seems Mr. McWhorter is enjoying himself. While this is usually indicative of an author’s appreciation for his subject and his ability to impart his knowledge of that subject to his audience, Mr. McWhorter has another motive at play. He seems, at times, to enjoy bringing an unorthodox grammar history to the reader, but even more so, he revels in such unorthodoxy’s seeming requisite jabs at fellow critics whose ideas he’s undermining and whose conservative linguistic pomposity he’s attacking. Such attacks’ circumstances work themselves out quite nicely. Mr. McWhorter presents a position that runs contrary to the mainstream, identifies why the position is more logical than the mainstream’s position, and then writes off the mainstream position as simplistic or ignorant or merely entrenched in static academic thought. The most frequent critique of such conservative linguists (e.g., David Crystal) is his simple (and, I presume, simplistic) summation of their explanations of various English language changes: “it just happened.” While I am no academic linguist, and, of Mr. Crystal’s works, I’ve only read his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, it is difficult to believe that Mr. McWhorter’s ideas can be quite so revolutionary as he makes them out to be, though his arguments for the influence of Welsh and Norse influences of Old English are very persuasive. A bit too persuasive, actually. Such persuasiveness leads me to the belief that Mr. McWhorter overstates either his argument’s uniqueness or its evidence. Thus his ideas aren’t so unique, because who could overlook such obvious evidence and his subsequent logical deductions, or, despite what appears to be the overwhelming nature of his evidence, the preponderance of the (unseen in this book) evidence actually runs against his claims. Nonetheless, Mr. McWhorter’s efforts at convincing me, especially of the influences of Celtic on English, have not fallen on deaf ears. I am keen to adopt several of his hypotheses, yet I will look further for the other side of the argument (i.e., conservative, mainstream linguists). That I am so eager to do so is a testament to my appreciation of Mr. McWhorter’s book.(less)

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Feb 07, 2010 Georg rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: english, non-fiction

A very interesting book with some new theories about the development of the English language from its Germanic roots. I like his comparisons of the members of the “gang” and even more since I am familiar with two of them (ok, one and a half). McWhorter shows without any prejudice that not only all human beings are equal but also all languages though they are very different. It’s an interesting point that a language with an “easy” grammar might be a bigger challenge for the speaker and that the E...more

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Feb 01, 2010 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: words-and-language, read-in-2010

I read McWhorter's "The Power of Babel" a few years ago and thought it was terrific. His subsequent effort, "Doing our own Thing", was a major disappointment - self-indulgent, undisciplined, and essentially pointless. So I would have skipped this one (a cover blurb that squeezes the chestnuts "rollicking tour" and "rousing celebration" into the same sentence is generally not a good sign). Did I really need reassurance from yet another linguist that it's OK to split an infinitive, or to end a sen...more I read McWhorter's "The Power of Babel" a few years ago and thought it was terrific. His subsequent effort, "Doing our own Thing", was a major disappointment - self-indulgent, undisciplined, and essentially pointless. So I would have skipped this one (a cover blurb that squeezes the chestnuts "rollicking tour" and "rousing celebration" into the same sentence is generally not a good sign). Did I really need reassurance from yet another linguist that it's OK to split an infinitive, or to end a sentence with a preposition? But then there was Manny's recent rave review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....

My reaction? Modified rapture at best. There's a kind of forced flashiness to McWhorter's style that I don't particularly enjoy. Calling English a dolphin in a family of assorted types of deer (the Germanic relatives of English) gets the point across, but the metaphor is nowhere near as clever as McWhorter seems to think, and spinning it out across two paragraphs ("antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme" - yeah, dude, we know what the word "deer" means, as if you hadn't already enumerated "antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on" earlier in the sentence) is irritating, to say the least.

For the first 60 pages of this book, McWhorter sets out to answer the question of why English favors the use of "be" and "do" as auxiliary verbs in constructions like "I'm watching TV" (actual present, as opposed to the habitual present "I watch TV", a distinction which confuses the bejasus out of most non-native speakers), in questions ("do you watch"?), or negative statements. None of its immediate relatives, either on the Germanic or the Romance side, uses such a construction. Fair enough, it's not a completely boring question, though it's hardly the major mystery he makes it out to be either. I figured out the answer to this at about age 5, when I first started to learn Irish (Gaelic) -- it's a Celtic thing, see?

So that extended first chapter, in which the only point that is being developed is that the Celtic languages (Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic) influenced English syntax, hardly qualifies as a major revelation. Unfortunately, McWhorter beats it into the ground like the proverbial dead horse. For 60 pages. You start the second chapter with a sense of profound relief only to find - unspeakable horror - that he's not done. More statement of the profoundly obvious.

I guess this is the major reason for my inability to share Manny's rabid enthusiasm for this book. Like so many of his colleagues, McWhorter expends a lot of effort in addressing what I consider to be obvious linguistic strawmen - the notion that linguistics is just about etymology, the red herring of grammatical hypercorrectness, the idea that vocabulary is the only measure of influence of one language on another, the spectacularly uninteresting strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's as if he's writing for a readership consisting exclusively of people who have never undergone the intellectual exercise of learning a second language. Because if you've ever gone through that particular struggle, it seems to me that you're guaranteed to have thought about language deeply enough to make much of the material in this book seem like little more than a statement of the bloody obvious.

And yeah, what the hell - it's a book about language, so I'll bitch. The shorthand term McWhorter uses throughout, that English employs a "meaningless do", seems infelicitous at best. (less)

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Dec 29, 2009 Barry rated it 3 of 5 stars

I like the way McWhorter thinks and I really enjoy the material. My lower than expected review rating stems from the limited areas he covers.
He addresses the "do" and "ing" of English thoroughly, so thoroughly that it felt like the 400 Blows! I got to feeling "enough already!" (which is not an English construction).
Instead of beating the Celts to death over and over, I would have liked an analysis of other situations where large numbers of non-English adults found themselves forced to speak Eng...more

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Sep 13, 2009 Erik rated it 3 of 5 stars

It may be hard to imagine an untold history of our mother tongue, but McWhorter – a favorite linguist of mine since The Power of Babel and Word on the Street – has managed to discover a new, untrod path using his powers of academic detective-work which leads to a highly provocative and little-known thesis that the deepest roots of English lie not in Anglo-Saxon, as traditionally believed, but through the earliest forms of Old Celtic, whose descendants include modern Welsh. His proof is predicate...more

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Jun 22, 2009 Mahala Helf rated it 1 of 5 stars

Six assertions of unexplained significance are belabored into the first three repetitious soporific chapters(literally--1st & last book in all my years that put me to sleep within a page time after time):

1. Most linguists study individual languages & are ignorant of others.
2. This ignorance causes them to exceptionalize and mistake the reasons for changes in the English language.
3. John McWhorter aloneable to synthesis research and theory about all languages to discern the errors.
3. Chan...more

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May 04, 2009 Tripp rated it 4 of 5 stars

As ways to fill your free time online, Bloggingheads.tv is one of the better choices. If you are unfamiliar, each show brings together two people, often on opposite or conflicting sides of an issue, to talk for about an hour using computer video cameras and telephones. Unlike TV, the format is given to long form, loose conversations, which means it isn't great for soundbites or quick watching, but it can be an engaging thought-provoking listen.

One of the great benefits of the series is watching...more As ways to fill your free time online, Bloggingheads.tv is one of the better choices. If you are unfamiliar, each show brings together two people, often on opposite or conflicting sides of an issue, to talk for about an hour using computer video cameras and telephones. Unlike TV, the format is given to long form, loose conversations, which means it isn't great for soundbites or quick watching, but it can be an engaging thought-provoking listen.

One of the great benefits of the series is watching authors and thinkers explain and unpack their ideas, without the watering down and excess caution you see with tv pundits. One of the people I was happiest to discover via Bloggingheads is John McWhorter. He combines subject expertise, a strong point of view and a personality that makes him seem like an ideal dinner companion. You can see him here talking to Glenn Loury about torture, Obama, and other issues of the day.

So I put his latest book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, on my wish list and my wife bought me a copy for my birthday. It is a small, somewhat odd, but completely enjoyable book. McWhorter is a linguist and in the book, he takes aim at a number of theories about English, none of which were known to me beforehand. One of the biggest is whether Celtic languages impacted the development of English. The CW is no, and McWhorter argues strongly for their impact.

Another interesting section is based on his skeptical take on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. His doesn't buy the idea that a language's grammar sets the parameters for how one understands the world. He points out that counter-examples are often left out of these supposed grammatical drivers of culture. For example, he notes "As towering a mind as literary critic Edmund Wilson, for example, thought the reason Russians seemed unable to keep a schedule was that Russian isa language where future tense is indicated largely via context- but then Japanese is like that, too, and the Japanese never seemed to have any problem with schedules."

McWhorters prose style is both erudite and conversational. His sentences are geared toward the interested layman, being neither jargon laden, nor condescending. It is these qualities that make a book that could so easily have been a challenge, a fun read that, while not easy, provides great stimulation. I will be reading more of these.(less)

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May 02, 2012 Tora rated it 4 of 5 stars

Unlike Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, which was entertainingly written, but full of egregious errors, this book is actually written by a professional linguist. Fortunately, John H. McWhorter is also a very entertaining writer.

It's a short book, but it tackles some big questions of interest to linguaphiles, such as "Why is English so different from other Indo-European languages? Why do we use "do" in questions and negations, and what is it with English using the...more

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Apr 13, 2011 Caitlin Marineau rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, linguistics, favorites

Every time I tried to explain to someone that I was reading a linguistics book about the history of English, their eyes would kind of glaze over and they would nod in a half-interested way. Too bad, because this book was great fun. McWhorter makes linguistics interesting and accessible to the average reader, and he adds a lot of humor to the mix to keep the book light. The book examines the roots of the unique nature of the English language, including the influence of Celtic languages on our gra...more

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Sep 21, 2010 Alexis Neal rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: breakfast-club, 100-books, nonfiction

An interesting read. McWhorter obviously has pet interests in linguistic history--interests which his readers may not always share (see, e.g., his obsession with the moderately intriguing, but not necessarily fascinating 'meaningless do'). Still, he makes seemingly logical arguments for the influence of Celtic languages on English grammar, the "strip down" of the language as a result of the Vikings, and the possibility that Proto-German finds many of its roots in Phoenician.

In fact, in my opini...more

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Sep 08, 2010 Kathrina rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bn-concept-group

Well, apparently there's a lot more to John McWhorter than that he just happens to be the guy that wrote this book. I guess once you've created a reputation as an esteemed, literate, intellectual African-American schooled in serious linguistics research, people will start throwing you in front of a camera and asking what you think about Obama and what your politics are (social conservatism). Of course I had to watch a few, and couldn't get beyond the fact that his upper lip absolutely does not m...more

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Apr 02, 2011 Becky rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: linguistics, non-fiction

While I find the subject of this book very interesting, the author's tone and style are extraordinarily grating. He can't make a point but once, and has to hammer it home over and over again, in the most condescending language possible. He whines and bitches his way through his explanations: "The Welsh! The Cornish! Arrg! My colleagues are idiots!!" "Viking pillaging of the English tongue! just LOOK at the geography, you morons!" Then he takes a really random break in his study of English to den...more

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About John H. McWhorter

Dr. John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers University, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. Before taking his position at the Manhattan Institute, he held teaching positions at Cornell University, where he held the position of Assistant Professor, and at the University of California, Berkele...more

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Books by John H. McWhorter

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

What Language Is: And What it Isn't and What it Could Be

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care

Word On The Street: Debunking The Myth Of A Pure Standard English

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Quotes from Our Magnificent Bastar...

“Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.

To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.

Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.

The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.

Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that.” — 1 person liked it

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